Monkey Mia and maritime misadventures

Travel the harsh and inhospitable Western Australian north west coast and you cannot help but be sympathetic to the plight of English buccaneer explorer William Dampier.

When he put into Shark Bay (so named by him) in 1699 on the Roebuck, Dampier was desperate to find potable water.

Sunset at Carnarvon shot by Carol just before our departure for Monkey Mia.

After failing in many attempts to dig wells, he and his crew tried to capture an Aborigine among a group and force him to reveal his source of supply.

The Aborigines resisted, Dampier shot one, and one of his men was speared in the cheek.

Walking trail overlooking Monkey Mia. Dampier was bothered by flies, too.

Dampier decided to withdraw, and the Roebuck left ‘New Holland’ without finding water, and sailed off to Timor, ‘my men growing scorbutic for want of refreshments’.

At the Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort on the Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay, where we stayed three nights, the water situation is still as delicate as ever.

Carol's rainbow at Monkey Mia after an afternoon storm.

Only government-subsidised desalinated water is on tap for cooking and drinking. For showers and washing, you use salty groundwater.

Not that this detracts from the experience of visiting a World Heritage listed region, home to a huge and colourful range of marine life described by Dampier in his log.

Without the desalinated water, the resort would be a very different place, not that this would concern grey nomads like us with contingent supplies (of Victorian Bitter).

Dolphin promenade

Like the other visitors to Monkey Mia, we thrilled to the hand feeding of dolphins, which seemed as interested in us as we were in them. I should add that the dolphins are deliberately underfed so as not to cultivate reliance.

Park ranger with hungry dolphins awaiting their snack.

We also found ourselves finding relief from the 37-degree heat by swimming in the cool and crystal clear sea (ignoring the thousands of stingrays that inhabit the area).

Denham.

Monkey Mia and the nearby former pearling township of Denham are remote points of civilisation. Denham (pop. 1,500) is 410 kilometres north of Geraldton and 330 kilometres south of Carnarvon, with only red sand, spinifex, acacia and melaleuca bush in between.

Shark Bay, with the western boundary Dirk Hartog Island, is steeped in maritime history, as indeed is most of the Western Australian coast.

Most of us know about Dirk Hartog from our school history lessons. He landed on the island in 1616, 152 years before the voyage of Captain Cook, and nailed to a post a pewter plate carrying a description of his landing.

Incredibly, another Dutch explorer William de Vlamingh found the site 81 years later and replaced the pewter plate with one of his own.

Dutch courage

I find it amazing that we are not all speaking Dutch, given that so many 17th century explorers from Holland charted the Western Australian coast. For an excellent chronicle, I would encourage readers to visit this site.

Fast forward to 1941 and another history making incident, the sea battle between HMAS Sydney and the German raider HSK Kormoran 200 kilometres west of Shark Bay.

Lifeboat from the HSK Kormoran.

Readers will recall that the Sydney was sunk with the loss of all 645 crew. The crew of the damaged Kormoran scuttled her and around 300 survivors out of the original 383 found their way to the WA mainland, where they became prisoners of war.

Just before leaving Carnarvon for Monkey Mia, we found a lifeboat from the Kormoran and lots of memorabilia on display at a museum at historic One Mile Jetty.

One Mile Jetty tram ride.

If you think one can immerse oneself (so to speak) only so much in maritime history without drowning, think again. Geraldton, our next port of call, 410 kilometres south of Denham, offered a veritable cornucopia for this blue water tragic.

One Mile Jetty.

Shells and stromatolites

But before leaving the Peron Peninsula, I should mention two other places that excited our interest there.

One is Shell Beach, where in a unique phenomenon, trillions of tiny shells known as coquina have accumulated over thousands of years to form banks up to 10 metres deep.

Calcium carbonate from the shells has over time hardened and bound the banks such that they can be and are mined as building blocks for local structures.

Coquina shells.

The other is Hamelin Pool, where we were able to observe rocky clumps of living fossils known as stromatolites. These 3,000-year-old colonies of micro organisms are related to the oldest and simplest forms of life that existed 3.5 billion years ago.

Coquina shell block mine at Hamelin Pool.

Back then, blue-green bacteria, the first living organisms to colonise earth, flourished in shallow waters, trapping floating sediments to build soft stromatolite clumps that began releasing oxygen, producing the environment for the evolution of air breathing life forms.

We found this glimpse at primeval life particularly fascinating, given that 2009 is the 200th anniversary year of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his publication The Origin of Species.

Stromatolites. Note the 100-year-old wool wagon tracks.

Wickedness and courage

Now to Geraldton (pop. 30,000) where we enjoyed a great game of golf, met new friends, attended the annual blessing of the crayfish fleet and, you guessed it, visited the Western Australian Museum and its riveting history of Dutch exploration of the coast.



Blessing of the Geraldton crayfish fleet.









Geraldton, viewed from the HMAS Sydney Memorial site.


Readers may recall the tragic story of the Batavia and its merchant commander Francisco Pelsaert.

Just to recapitulate, in 1629 the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ship Batavia, with 322 people on board, was wrecked on Morning Reef, one of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands 40 nautical miles off the coast of Geraldton.

Replica of the Batavia longboat, built by TAFE students.

In an amazing navigational feat, Pelsaert and skipper Adriaan Jacobz, with 46 other survivors including two women and a baby, sailed the ship’s 10.7-metre open longboat 1,500 nautical miles to Batavia (Jakarta) in 29 days, without loss of life, to get help.

I quote from a plaque: “For those remaining on the islands, what followed was a horrific story of mutiny, murder, rape and retribution. By the time Pelsaert returned (72 days after arriving in Batavia) 124 shipwreck survivors had died at the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz, a senior company officer and his followers.”

These people had been drowned, stabbed, strangled or bludgeoned to death, the women forced into concubinage.

Canon retrieved from the Batavia wreck.

The hero of the story is Wiebbe Hayes, whom Cornelisz had isolated with 20 others on another island hoping they would die. However, Hayes and his companions found water and food, and organised the defence of his men and others who escaped the bloodshed, repelling attacks from Cornelisz and eventually capturing him.

On his return Pelsaert rounded up the mutineers, and Cornelisz and others were summarily hanged, Cornelisz after having his hands chopped off with mallet and chisel.

Memorial to Wiebbe Hayes, hero of the Batavia mutiny, on the Geraldton esplanade.

The museum provides a detailed account of the tragedy, and carries a large number of items retrieved from the wreck, including all the elements of a masonry portico meant for the Dutch East India Company castle in Batavia.

The hewn blocks, stowed as ballast in the Batavia, have been mounted on a scaffold at the museum and what an impressive portico it is, as our picture shows.

There is much more to the Batavia story, of course, and many more stories of heroism from the litany of Dutch shipwrecks on the Western Australian coast, but interested readers can follow up themselves on the net.

Portico meant for the VOC Castle in Batavia, mounted in the Western Australian Museum.

And finally…

I’ll mention just one more story that fascinated me. The VOC ship Zeewijk commanded by Jan Steyns, with a crew of 212 and 315,836 guilders in storage was wrecked in 1728 on a Houtman Abrolhos reef when en route from Holland to Batavia via the Cape of Good Hope.

Ten drowned attempting to launch a boat. Eventually the crew set up camp and began salvaging gear from the wreck. Soon after a longboat and 11 seamen set out for Batavia to seek help but were never seen again.

After living off seals and birds on the island, which eventually began to diminish in number, the survivors decided to build a boat from the wreckage and local timber.

After four months’ incredible craftsmanship, the 20-metre keelboat Sloepie was launched. It enabled 82 survivors (six having died en route) to reach Batavia just nine months after the Zeewijk foundered.

I felt this good news story would make a terrific movie.

Needless to say, Carol had to drag me kicking and screaming from the museum as I would have set up camp there if I could.

Teeing off at the 10th at the Spalding Park Golf Club in Geraldton -- one activity that could drag me from the museum.